Utility to cat/gunzip a list of files

Question

Is there a commonly-installed Linux utility that will take a list of files and cat or gzip -d (==zcat) them based on whether the file is compressed?

An example of where I just needed this is when I want to examine /var/log/messages files, including both the logrotated ones (/var/log/messages-{date}.gz) and the current file.

I'll likely add something like the following to my ~/.zshrc:

catz () {
    local file
    for file ; do
        case $file in
            *gz*) gzip -d < $file ;;
            *bz*) bzip -d < $file ;;
            *xz*|*lz*) xz -d < $file ;;
            *) cat $file ;;
        esac
    done
}

But, I'm not always on a machine where I have my rc installed, so I was hoping for a more general solution.

Answer 1

less does that.

less /var/log/messages*

If you pipe the output of less to another program, less will behave like cat or gunzip -c and not page the output.

Answer 2

The "more general solution" that you're looking for is to train your fingers to type out zcat -f … instead of trying to flip back and forth between zcat and cat.

By the way:

• zgrep will search through both compressed and uncompressed files without an additional flag.
• bzcat -f behaves like zcat -f - both will simply output (without decompressing) files that are not in their native compression format instead of understanding that it's a different compressed format and sub-forking off the right decompression program.